ESSENTIAL TRADER SOFTWARE Daytraders put heavy demands on system resources and are under constant threat from bad guys. Hereâs a list of programmes that I have found useful or essential to keeping my PC running fast and well protected. Many of you will find you PC runs faster, safer and with a lot more free hard drive space. If you have something you are using that you can recommend please add to the list and please state if itâs Free, Full Working Free Trial or we gotta pay to make it work⦠1. To start off, hereâs a great programme for listing all running processes. Itâs great for killing Messenger and Creative Ring3 NT Interface (this is a driver for 4 speaker surround sound â if your not using 4 speakers it can cause phantom reboots â right click and stop the process. It will come back with any sound and I use this programme to stop it. Like Messenger itâs infamous for being hard to stop, but this makes it easy). http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx Free 2. This is great for keeping the registry tuned up â especially after a MS update has hacked away at it. It sticks to the essentials rather that listing 186 problems â and itâs fast. http://www.sofotex.com/RegScrubXP-download_L7528.html Free 3. A âMUST HAVEâ security programme and itâs free. This could protect you when your antivirus would fail. http://www.novatix.com/Cyberhawk/ProtectionStats.aspx Free 4. If you wonder how your hard drive got so cluttered, this reveals most of the problems. Thereâs a fantastic solution to getting more hard drive free space later on this list. http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml (Download TreeSize Free) Free 5. Ever wondered what your hard drive is up to? Is it a hacker or legitimate process clattering away? This displays everything thatâs going on in your hard drive in real time⦠http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/Filemon.mspx Free 6. I really like this antivirus programme as itâs very fast, doesnât use much in the way of resources and itâs free. I found this better than AVG if I want to run it during working hours. http://www.free-av.com/ Free 7. A heavyweight Firewall and itâs free. The downside is it takes a bit of work to maintain. Much more effective than Zonelabs Free â will compete with Zonelabs Pro. For goodness sake donât use Windows Firewall as it doesnât stop anything leaking information from your PC â Windows Firwall only tries to stop them coming in and itâs not great at that. And if you donât use a firewall donât trade online. http://www.jetico.com/ Free â Jetico Personal Firewall 8. Another heavyweight Firewall thatâs easier to configure and use but itâs not free. Great antispyware â try it. http://www.agnitum.com/ Full Working Trial Firewall & Antispyware 9. Helps keep the bad guys out. http://www.agnitum.com/products/tauscan/ Full Working Trial AntiTrojan 10. This is a âMUST TRYâ but it will take you an hour just to try it out. I tried everything without any problems including compacting my registry. XP collects files like no OS before it and when you delete temp files in the normal way XP still can have many Gbâs of files cluttering up your system. I got rid of 7.5Gb of crap on my hard drive! http://www.tune-up.com/ Full Working Free Trial 11. Iâm not sure if thereâs a free trial of this one. I bought it because itâs so fast and can be run anytime without placing much of a demand on my system. So far I have not found a free antispyware programme that doesnât leave a lot to be desired. http://www.paretologic.com/products/xoftspyse/ Detects and removes: adware, spyware, pop-Up generators, keyloggers, trojans, hijackers, and malware Very Fast 12. Our charts are written to the hard drive before displaying on the screen and a realtime defrag can speed up this process considerably. On the most recent eSignal Newsletter one vendor is claming it can speed up your system to being 80% faster than when new. For that reason I will list this as a âMUST TRYâ product. Iâm trying it now but need a fast market to see how it performs under stress. http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/ Full Working Free Trial 13. This compliments the above defrag. Iâm trying it out and so far I really like it. It avoids page swapping memory files. http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/ooclevercache/ Full Working Free Trial 14. This is the Defrag that was mentioned in eSignalâs newsletter. I have it on my list to trial next. If anyone has tried it please give it a review. http://www.diskeeper.com/diskeeper/home/premiertrialware.asp Full Working Free Trial I hope you find something on this list that helps. Good trading. Any comments help to keep this list on the Discussion List so others will see it.
Guys, the realtime disk defraggers have caused minor conflicts with my Firefox and Ensign. A friend reports no problems. When I changed a timeframe on a chart the bars were missing and webpages were blank. I will try it on a fast market and not change a timeframe to see how it performs. All the rest are sweet.
Thanks too. I also use ccleaner to clean the registry and its free(sorry, haven't learned to attach the url address yet)
Maybe a little out of subject, but related to the system maintenance too, there is a little freeware called Sequoia which I appreciate a lot : It allows you to "view" the contents of your hardrive, and identify the biggest files. You can read some reviews at Snapfile : http://www.snapfiles.com/get/sequoia.html or go to it's home, at the Technisch Universiteit Eindhoven : http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/ It has been realy helpfull for me a day when Windows pretended that I had no more freespace on my c: drive. (The log file of PCCillin, my AV, had reached close to 20 GB!) Olivier.
I use: regvac - registry cleaner AdAware - anti-spyware LogMeIn - remote desktop Speed Startup - shortens boot time Watchdog-O-Matic - monitors/restarts applications automatically if they crash or hang
MSFT has/had its own program called RegClean. It fixes errors. It's on my machine. While much of his lists looks good, at least one of those programs will have some sort of spyware or malware in it. Law of averages. No one gives everything away for free.. So I will stick with the MSFT RegClean.
http://www.spychecker.com/program/pingplotter.html Free This is an excellent programme for checking your ping times. If you use Whats Running from the list you can get the IP addresses of IB's TWS or eSignal etc.